While you’re hanging at St. Louis Park’s Sweet Lou’s Meats, waiting in line for your sandwich—maybe a Reuben, that lush mesh of Swiss and sauerkraut and 10-day-brined pastrami barely constrained between two slices of rye; maybe a sausage-and-egg breakfast sandwich slicked with aioli—wander over to the beef case in the front corner of the restaurant. You’ll find ribeyes trimmed with thick white ribbons of fat; ruby-bright tenderloins; delicately marbled Denver and bavette steaks; and even rarer cuts like the teres major from the shoulder, butterflied open and sold on a skewer.
Co-owner (and namesake!) Louisa Farhat is a masterful butcher—she learned the art while simultaneously working pastry in Chicago kitchens. “I was working at a place that had a whole animal program,” she says. “One day the butcher really needed help, and I had some extra time, so I started helping him out. I liked it and I was good at it, so I just kept doing it. I flip-flopped between pastry, baking, and butchering for the next 15 years until eventually I finally firmly planted it to meat cutting. We started Sweet Lou’s as a COVID idea—literally two packs of different kinds of sausage at the Northeast Farmers Market—and then just kept running from there.”
For a while, she and Dubay (her husband and business partner in Sweet Lou’s) kept their day jobs: She was the meat and seafood manager at the Seward Co-op; Dubay was a sous chef at the original Butcher’s Tale. Eventually, they jumped all in. They launched Sweet Lou’s as an LLC the same day they learned they were pregnant with their daughter, who’s now nearly five years old.
Sweet Lou’s ran the market and food truck circuit for a good few years before Farhat and Dubay set their sights on their new brick-and-mortar location in St. Louis Park. Their new spot (which, in a past life, was Nelson’s Meats, Bakery, and Deli) gives them the space for a best-of-both-worlds set-up: Dubay runs the kitchen while Farhat leads the meat program, butchering whole animals in-house. “Our first day, people were coming in for breakfast, and then all of a sudden a lamb came in, half a cow came in, a hog came in—people were probably like, I just wanted a cup of coffee, what is this place?” she says, laughing. (On the coffee note—Dubay and Farhat hired on baristas to run a full coffee program, so you can get a miel or a matcha or a hot cup of Red Wolf Chai along with your breakfast sausage and hash browns.)…